Software vendors are continually advancing the latest in development tools for users to take advantage of software made available to consumers. Typically, such tools require some level of familiarity by developer with the tool(s) language and structure in order to use the development tool(s) and develop the appropriate interface. However, the rapid evolution in which such development frameworks are manufactured and sold impact the speed with which such tools can be understood and used to provide the software for which they are created. Developers are still left spending an inordinate amount of time learning and struggling with the development environment in order to provide a suitable product for a customer.
Many applications require values to be entered that are validated against a collection of values. To provide an intuitive user interface, the possible values are listed for the user to select from one of the values. These values are commonly referred to as “lookup” values.
Conventional development tools have supported lookup control configuration; however, there was limited design-time support. In order to enable design-time support, developer(s) configured and bound together individual elements to display a lookup style control populated with the appropriate values. This involved dragging controls to the form, setting properties, and writing the code to fill the control—which proved to be a time-intensive and tedious task.
Additionally, lookup controls are often used in a two-dimensional fashion in which, in addition to providing a selection of choices, the control can also drive the selected item with another set of properties. One set of properties is employed to populate the list; another set of properties is used to pull out the selected value. This power introduces a set of complexity that can confuse even the most sophisticated user.